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The Power of Focus

It’s amazing what we can do when we are focused. The problem is that sometimes it feels like such a strain to be able to focus on just one thing. So many things need to be done...different things in different areas of our lives. It feels like we’re being pulled in a hundred different directions during our day. Sometimes lack of focus is not as simple as it may seem. If you’re having trouble focusing, why is that?

What are some underlying reasons behind your lack of focus?

It might be that focus is subconsciously associated in your mind with something that is stressful or bad. For example you might have gone through traumatic events that forced you to go into “focus mode” to solve emergency problems. Having gone through that, now you associate focus with trauma. Or maybe one of your parents was constantly pushing you to focus on your studies for too many hours when you were little and now you associate focus with the awful feeling you had as a kid. Whatever it may be, it’s important to get to the root of what your mind associates focus with so that you can undo this wrong notion.

Don’t let trauma guide your life.

This may be a foreign notion to you, but all the things that we have gone through influence our minds and our reactions to other events in life. For example, when my kids were little I suffered a traumatic experience at a supermarket. For years I didn’t want to go back to that supermarket and would do everything that I could to avoid it. After I caught myself doing that, I decided that I wasn’t going to let that one event determine the way I went about my daily life. Now I have absolutely no problem going there.

Redirect your thoughts.

In the same way that I caught my wrong thinking pattern about the supermarket, you can change the wrong thinking pattern about focus too. Instead of looking at it as a forced and contrived thing we should look at it as the most productive hours of our day. We should see it as the best of our day and not the most painful. There’s a quote by Brian Tracy that goes like this:

“The key to success is to focus our conscious mind on things we desire not things we fear.”

When we put our mind to good and positive things, our ability to be productive multiplies. In order to be focused we must have goals that we want to achieve or else we end up wandering. You can read more about why setting goals is important here.

The power of association.

Another thing that really helps is to create an environment of wonderful things at the time that we are focused. For example; have wonderful smells, images and sounds around you when you are focused. Light some scented candles and put calm relaxing music on with no lyrics. These things can create a great environment of joy and your brain will start to associate the focused hours with positive and enjoyable things.

Don’t try to do too much at once.

Trying to think of all of the things that need to get done might get you into a paralysis mode. And that will be a big hurdle as you won’t even know where to begin. If you can determine what you will be doing for the next 2 hours instead of the entire day your mind won’t be as scattered. If 2 hours still seems overwhelming then decide just for the next 30 minutes what you will be doing. You will be able to accomplish a lot more if you do things in bite sized pieces.